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If you want to have a staring contest with me, you'll lose

Her playful moments and little one-liners, like the note at the restaurant; the scene stealing the dress.

On another note I thought the ghost scene was very affecting. Woodcock talking about how he wakes up sobbing, etc. His line about the dead watching us felt both like a loving reference to Kubrick and an important note in a film that, as has been mentioned, goes alongside Rebecca as enigmatic ghost-haunted love story.

The key moment (aside from the discussion about keeping her mother close to her) is when Barbara Rose is being interrogated about selling Visas to the Jews during the war. It is not a mistake that Alma is front and center reacting with understandable disgust at this line of inquiry. From an interview with Krieps:

The closest she comes to explaining Alma is in terms of the second world war and its after-effects: “Alma has seen people die. She has seen what it means to lose your home and country. She comes from cold, windy Germany and is transported into a warm world in London, wrapped in silk and light. People who live through the war cannot think about themselves. They cannot ask: ‘Am I weak?’ ‘Am I strong?’ They just have to get up and be brave.” And being brave – although she would be the last person to boast – comes naturally to Krieps.

It is clear through the subtext of the film (and verified through sources like these) that Alma is Jewish, and that her family is likely long gone. The likelihood that someone like her would have wound up waitressing in the countryside in England at that time is somewhat unlikely were her home life still in tact. Say what you will about Anderson's decision to keep much of this below a few layers of the film's skin, but I think it's a stronger whole because of it. The movie is about Alma in a lot of ways, but it would have been a violation of its tone to go too deep on her backstory beyond contextual hints. She is an incredibly strong-willed person who is looking forward, who has found herself a lucky and unique niche in the world when she may not have had a world at all, and in my view, it would not have been quite right to focus too much on where she came from. In this respect, I thought her character might have been mildly inspired by Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which Anderson saw likely around the time this film was coming together. It's similarly important to that film that we see the character mostly as looking forward and moving on from his past instead of dwelling on the tragedy of it, until he's pushed to the brink by incredible rudeness in the guise of high society mockery by a harried Gustave H. (Perhaps, if Alma were in the room when Lady Baltimore was going on about "Is this some kind of custom where she comes from? Is she out there stealing things?" we might have gotten a similarly biting soliloquy that would've been well earned, but this isn't the film for it.)

is ultimately why she and Reynolds are not reported for engaging in their consentual poisoning routine, though. He wouldn't want to eliminate some chance of swooping in and courting her were it to present itself. But again: chewed up; spit out.