"RICHMOND, June 15 -- House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr. may have sensed his career free-falling last Wednesday when he faced 24 members of the George Mason Republican Women's Club at a Tysons Corner luncheon. That's when Carol Ford let him have it.

It was just five days after the first published report about allegations of his sexual misconduct. Wilkins had made brief remarks about his vision for Virginia and fielded a couple of easy questions. Then Ford, with her 15-year-old daughter nearby, started grilling him about his dealings with women, zeroing in on the $100,000 settlement he had paid to one accuser back home in Amherst County.

Wilkins replied in part by saying that he was gregarious by nature. He conceded that other women would probably go public soon with their own harassment complaints, according to club members.

"Carol did a really magnificent job of going after him," club leader Janice L. Schar said of Ford, a Fairfax Station resident, who declined to be interviewed. "She didn't let him off the hook. It had to count."

It was small scenes like that and larger forces like an outraged state party hierarchy that accelerated the ouster of Wilkins as Virginia's top lawmaker, GOP leaders and activists said.

Party leaders said Wilkins's forced resignation late Thursday was a milestone for a younger generation of Republicans who politically cannot afford -- in the aftermath of the GOP-led Clinton impeachment -- to appear slow to respond when even revered figures such as Wilkins stand accused of grave personal misconduct.

"We've been preaching for years that we're different in the way we react," said Virginia Republican Party Chairman Gary R. Thomson.

"How we respond as a corporate group tells a lot about us. The speaker explained, but his colleagues looked at it with a critical eye," Thomson said. "They said, 'We don't need this affecting our ability to lead.'"

GOP strategists also said that there was another key reason for acting swiftly that went beyond political self-preservation and the generational clash between Wilkins's old guard and the young Turks of the House Republican Caucus. To those who had witnessed what Wilkins himself called his "huggy" ways, the June 7 report in The Washington Post on the $100,000 out-of-court settlement and subsequent harassment allegations all had the ring of truth, House members said.

Wilkins acknowledged he reached the settlement with Jennifer L. Thompson, but denied allegations that he had groped her and pinned her against office furniture.

State Del. John A. "Jack" Rollison III (R-Prince William), a Wilkins confidant, said that blanket media coverage, a simmering impatience with Wilkins as speaker and other factors seemed to conspire to overthrow the 24-year General Assembly veteran.

"You take all these things -- sensationalizing it in the press, the blind ambition and jockeying for position in the caucus -- stir them up and throw in a sex scandal and what do you get? A pot boiling over," Rollison said.

Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore (R) probably administered the coup de grace Wednesday afternoon by demanding Wilkins's resignation (Kilgore's twin brother, Del. Terry G. Kilgore of rural Scott County, was his pipeline into the caucus). But the die actually was cast Monday night, when the GOP caucus met in closed-door session to figure out what to do with Wilkins, Republicans said.

For 3½ hours that night, as his wife and lawyers sat upstairs in the House chamber, Wilkins, 65, tried but failed to persuade colleagues that he had done nothing wrong -- either in the case of the 26-year-old Amherst woman or in other matters beginning to come to light, several participants said.

Delegates, speaking on the condition that their names not be used, described the session in House Room 4 of the state Capitol that muggy night as a roller coaster ride of emotions, as one after the other peppered Wilkins with intimate questions about his conduct toward women in general and the allegations involving the settlement in particular.

Some older House members, including Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr. (Fairfax), 70, and Del. Frank D. Hargrove Sr. (Hanover), 75, were counseling restraint, a.go-slow approach that they said would avoid an unfair rush to judgment.

Others were merciless in their questioning.

Colleagues said Del. Robert G. Marshall (Prince William), a House gadfly, asked Wilkins at one point what part of a woman's body he had touched in an alleged incident. Another time, Del. Richard H. Black (Loudoun) asked Wilkins whether he had ever had affairs, and the speaker responded by saying that Black should pose the question to all the others in the room.

That exchange prompted one young member to declare that he had, always been faithful to his wife and family, as if he -- not Wilkins -- were in the court of caucus opinion, delegates said.

Several women seemed outraged by the $100,000 settlement and what they considered Wilkins's non-responsive answers. Dels. Jeannemarie Devolites (Fairfax) and Terrie Lynne Suit (Virginia Beach) were critical, as was Del. Thelma Drake (Norfolk), a widely respected caucus member. Del. Winsome E. Sears (Norfolk), a Wilkins protégé, wanted to know why the speaker had opened the meeting by reading a prepared statement, instead of speaking from the heart.

In addition to his statement, Wilkins showed a videotaped interview with the hosts of a Dec. 15 Christmas party where another guest had claimed she was fondled by the speaker. Delegates said that ploy backfired, especially among women members who resented the tape's implication that the woman was somehow not credible.

By the end of the meeting -- after Wilkins had said repeatedly that he was constrained by the confidentiality agreement that he and Thompson had signed -- the caucus had taken halfhearted steps toward setting up an independent ethics process to review the Wilkins case. But delegates never reached true consensus on that possible solution.

"Even in the ebb and flow of that meeting, there was an almost fatalistic feeling," Rollison recalled.

Things fell apart for Wilkins soon after Monday night. Within 48 hours, a delegate announced that there were other "credible" allegations of harassment, Kilgore called for his resignation, Wilkins had faced the unforgiving crowd in Northern Virginia and the Virginia Federation of Republican Women had alerted its 2,600 members by e-mail to contact their delegates immediately.

"The whole thing was appalling," said Charlotte Neal of Richmond, the federation's immediate past president, adding that the caucus did not act quickly enough in jettisoning Wilkins. "I don't know what century these men are living in, but what more facts did they need?"

On Thursday night, in a conference call to reporters announcing that was quitting, Wilkins said he read the signs from the Monday night meeting and soon after began preparing to resign.

"That's why I decided to go ahead and hang it up," Wilkins said with a sad chuckle, "'cause I might do more harm than good."" (R. H. Melton, The Washington Post, June 16, 2002).