“Roman Fever” establishes the similarity between its two main characters from the opening paragraph. As yet unnamed, they are alike in age (“middle”), in affluence (“well-cared-for”), and in their reactions to the view of Rome (“vague but benevolent approval”) (749). Subsequent details align them even more specifically. Both women are widows from New York City traveling with daughters in early adulthood. They had been friends as young women and, after their marriages, lived on the same block of East 73rd Street in Manhattan. They had drifted apart but reunite in Rome accidentally. The narrator says, “They had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter” (752). Again, the story notes “the similarity of their lots” and the “mutual confessions” they share bind them together. They matter less as individuals than as representatives of “a collective modern idea of Mothers” (749).

Although the characters are thus presented as similar, the story unfolds through the exploration of their differences, particularly as they emerge from one final, and crucial, similarity: while in Rome as young women, both had fallen in love with the same man, Delphin Slade. He married Alida rather than Grace, which is the root of their differences.