Show and Tell

While on a plane ride last Friday, I read Sense and Sensibility again. To be honest, I didn't make it through the book the first time, but in my defense, I was in tenth grade and bored by all the run-on sentences in the first few chapters.
So now, having read and enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, I tried to give S&S another shot. And I loved it, as usual, right up until the cop-out ending.
Oh, Ms. Austen, why must you taunt us with your perfectly-woven web of storytelling, only to leave us hanging in said web at the last minute?
As I was reading this very abrupt, anti-climactic climax, I remembered the axiom imparted in us Bryn Mawr students by one of my professors: Show, don't tell. For the most part, I understood what this professor meant at the time. But nothing hammers a point home like frustration. So when I finally neared the end of the novel, just after Marianne has recovered from her near-death experience and Willoughby has confessed his real love for her (despite his stupidity) to her sister Elinor, I was getting really anxious. How would Marianne react to this news? Would she fall ill again? Would she try to love him despite his being married? Or would it help her get over him? Oh my!
Marianne and Elinor head out on a walk, and just as Elinor is wondering if Marianne is recovered enough to hear this news, Marianne says, "At present, if I could be satisfied on one point, if I could be allowed to think that he was not always acting a part, not always deceiving me[...] If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy."
I think, now Elinor will reveal it all, now we will see how she takes it! For throughout the whole novel we've had pages-long descriptions of conversations, and the whole latter half of the book has been leading up to this one.
Instead, all we get is: "[Elinor] managed the recital, as she hoped, with address; prepared her anxious listener with caution; related simply and honestly the chief points on which Willoughby grounded his apology..." etc.
WHAT?!?!
To be fair, Sense and Sensibility had a good deal more closure than Pride and Prejudice ("then they were married and lived happily ever after the end"). But seeing as how I still had 5 and a half hours of my flight left by the time I set it down, I was rather put-out.
Show the reader what's happening at important intervals in the novel - especially the climax! - because telling it is not only boring, but even frustrating for the reader. Not that I don't love Ms. Austen. I just think we can safely agree that endings weren't her strongest point.