A brief observation about E. F. Benson's ghost stories

When I wasn't reading bad religious novels, I was plowing through seven hundred pages of E. F. Benson's ghost/vampire/general horror tales (because academics, when not reading, are...reading).  One interesting deviation from the Victorian Gothic tradition: Benson's professional men.  As I've mentioned before, Victorian Gothic frequently features male professionals--highly-educated, logical, empirical--abruptly thrown into contact with Bad Stuff (ghosts, vampires, were-things, etc.). The boundaries of "professional" shift as one gets to the end of the century, when the doctors and lawyers are supplemented by college professors and civil servants, but it's always important that these are a) professionals and b) men.  (Think, for example, of the major characters in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Dracula.) As the Gothic plot unfolds, the professional man, who almost always starts out as a skeptic, finds himself faced with a stark choice:  alter his understanding of "the real," or die.  But Benson's professional men are almost never skeptics--they begin the narrative already believing in/interested in/studying the supernatural.  It's just a matter of carefully observing the phenomena.  They're afraid, but they rarely disbelieve.  In other words, most of his characters don't experience any sort of "conversion" experience.   Given the prominence of spiritualism in Benson's work, I'm wondering if the rise of the Society for Psychical Research plays into his revision of the trope--the professional man could also be legitimately interested in the supernatural, clairvoyance, and so forth.