 He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends.He worked for a living, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds of masculine society.He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality.