One of the more remarkable things about the fabulous girls who are high fashion models, aside from their huge earnings-several of them make as much as $50,000 a year-is the fact so many of them fell into their careers by the sheerest accident.

Take, for instance, an astounding creature who chooses to call herself "Dovima," a tall, slim darkly beautiful young lady who is undoubtedly the highest paid model in the world-fully dressed-with a fantastic rate of $75 an hour.

"I was going to an art school," she said, "where I'd been studying for six years, intending to be an illustrator. I had a date for lunch with a friend who worked in a building full of advertising agencies and fashion magazines, although I didn't know it at the time, and I was waiting for her in the lobby.

"A woman came along, stopped, and looked at me, and asked me what I was doing there. When I told her, she took me by the arm and said, 'Come with me,' and I don't know why, but I just went along.

"Well, she took me upstairs to a magazine office and showed me around as if I was a prize piece of horseflesh, and the next day I was posing for that magazine."

When she first began posing, Dovima-her name used to be Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba-was paid $17.50 an hour.

A year and a half ago she startled the world of high fashion by raising her rate from $50 and hour to $60. After she was given a contract to appear in the Paramount picture, "Funny Face," with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, a picture about the fashion industry, she raised her rate to $75.

"It isn't greed," said Dovima earnestly, "it's just intellectual curiousity. I keep wondering how high I can go, because it seems that every time I raise my rate, the demand for me gets bigger."

Dovima is five feet, eight inches without shoes, and she weighs 115 pounds. (High fashion models don't talk about their bust, waist and hip measurements, because they are supposed to be flat all over.)

"I have to keep eating all day long," she said, "to keep that weight. If I stop eating for a minute I lose weight right away and I look haggard."

She works not more than four hours, four days a week because, she says, she likes leisure.

As a model she's been to Paris five times; countless times to California; Peru; Egypt; London; virtually every island in the Caribbean, to Florida, and many other places. All expenses paid, too.

Dovima is married to a young man named John Golden. He is in the travel agency business.