In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in. As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed courthouse gates. They went in through a side door. In the lower corridor the two lawyers found Moore arguing with Rosina Sacco in the center of a group of gesticulating Italians. Thompson could hear Rosina’s voice shrill to the edge of breaking, demanding of Moore by what right he represented her husband. She didn’t want him, she shouted, she didn’t believe in him. She wanted a good lawyer. Rosina’s outburst was the culmination of months of bitterness. She had neither liked nor approved of Moore from the beginning. Her thrifty peasant nature was affronted by his manner of life, his Beacon Hill house and car with chauffeur—all paid for by poor Italians. Now she was telling him in effect: Get out! And he was refusing. Thompson and John and Jerry McAnarney talked the matter over in one of the anterooms. “I want either you or John to replace Moore,” Jerry told Thompson. Thompson said it was too late. The next day at latest the jury would be empaneled. “You have got to make the best of it,” he told the brothers. When Moore joined them in the anteroom, Jerry McAnarney offered to turn back his first payment of two thousand dollars and go on with the case for nothing if Moore would only retire. Moore refused to consider it. He had hired the McAnarneys as subordinates, not to give him orders. With their narrow conservatism, he considered them incapable of the larger view the case demanded.