a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball

'Then he began to watch Charlotte and now they all watched her . . . as she . . . began to draw swiftly . . . an enormous man . . . sitting behind a table heaped with glittering coins which the man was shovelling into a sack with a huge hand on which glittered a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball.'

'William Faulkner, The Wild Palms, 1939.